In today's human capital management (HCM) environment, companies are facing more complex employment conditions that require better and more granular control and flexibility. This need is especially important for those businesses which must comply with statutory regulations. Statutory requirements may involve aggregating work assignments, handling benefits across assignments, and/or managing workers who may have multiple assignments under one or more employment contracts.
These complex employment conditions are generally encountered in public sector, healthcare, and retail organizations. Some of the organizations that face the complex employment situations are enterprises that consist of multiple employing entities. The employing entities may be several subsidiaries or business units. The business units may be located in several countries with each country having certain rules about employment. The workforce may include employees that are concurrently employed by more than one business unit. The multiple employers for an employee can result in frequent changes in working conditions. The multi-national conglomerates are generally regulated with a great amount of vigor. Further, the companies may also face demands on the terms and conditions of employment, from compensation rates to progression, based on collective or individual employment agreements and/or industry regulations.
Traditionally, the employment of a person has been modeled as a two-tier system 100 as shown in FIG. 1. The two-tier systems are designed to handle two levels. A first level of the system is identified as a work relationship level 102, which is designed to store details of the relationship between the person and the enterprise. For example, the first level stores information that a person is an employee of a particular legal entity and over a specific period of time. A second level of the system is identified as an assignment level 104, which is designed to store details of the job performed by that person. This two-tier system is insufficient for various enterprises.
Not all of the complexities of employment situations can be easily managed using current solutions, such as the two-tier system. For instance, at least one current solution allows customers to store one or more assignments for a person and allows a legal contract to be noted against each of these assignments. However, this solution does not allow for the creation of one or more fully articulated sets of employment terms, which can be associated to one or more assignments. Moreover, these solutions do not allow customers to define what an assignment or a work contract actually means to a specific business and thus provides an unduly rigid approach to what is recorded against each assignment.
It is in light of these and other considerations that the present application is being presented.